Tuesday, 20 August 2013

“Yes,” said Golg. “I have heard of those little scratches in the crust that you Topdwellers call mines. But that’s where you get dead gold, dead silver, dead gems. Down in Bism we have them alive and growing. There I’ll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat and squeeze out a cupful of diamond juice. You won’t care much about fingering the cold, dead treasures of your shallow mines after you have tasted the live ones in Bism.”

I am fascinated by our collective fascination with live music. Why does it make a difference whether we access a piece of music through the thick dark air of a crowded pub or via a commercial recording and distribution process?

I question the mechanism, but I have no doubt as to the potency of its effect. I revel in live performance. I even listen to live albums - which I simultaneously find conceptually daft and utterly compelling.

My own pet theory is that liveness (life?) is a perception of the possibility of being otherwise. As each note is struck, plucked or sung, the audience knows that though the piece may be written a certain way, in a live rendition it ain't necessarily so. Any given note has the potential to be substituted, varied or flubbed.

But once a note has transformed from a musical intention into a perturbation of air and propagated through the room at (approximately) 340.29 metres per second, it drops down dead to the floor. The high note has been hit, or not. The high hat has been hit, or not. The blue note has been blown and the possibility of being otherwise has ceased.

Music-as-code offers a variation on this theme. If I, for example, describe my music with Clojure and Overtone, then I can render my music to my speakers. But I can also alter it at will. If I take care to directly represent the deep structure of my music in code, then I can easily make changes to instrumentation/tempo/swing that even editors and sequencers of binary sound files cannot.

I can bring the power of iteration, of version control, of collective review, of unit testing, of my combined past and present selves, to bear on a piece of music. The possibility of being otherwise is preserved.

Music created with Overtone isn't just live - in a sense it's immortal. What's more, we now have the perfect retort to the unkind critic - "Pull requests accepted".